Plastic pallet recycling in Houston: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

Houston in the numbers

The Houston metro counts 33,785 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 1.78% of the US industry and 1.2% of private jobs in the metro, 10th of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 10 counties: Austin, Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston and Harris and others. Warehousing is 1.2% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 19.2% of Texas's 175,579 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 77571 (La Porte, 33).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Harris (23,802), Fort Bend (5,368) and Montgomery (1,828).

• Harris County23,802 jobs, 70.5% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Fort Bend County5,368 jobs, 15.9% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Montgomery County1,828 jobs, 5.4% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Houston metro. The most concentrated is chemical manufacturing, at 2.2 times the national share of employment.

• Chemical manufacturing42,669 jobs in 2025, 4.78% of the US total. Say what the pallets carried. A residue of an unknown chemical is a stop. A drum pallet that held a benign material is a normal stream. Chemical resistance is why plastic is chosen. Wear, leaks and spills retire them. CP9 changes retire a whole footprint. In a pile from here, photograph any staining and the drum seats.
• Warehousing and storage33,785 jobs in 2025, 1.78% of the US total. General-purpose 48 x 40 pallets, nestables for empty storage and rackables on beams. Warehouses hold the widest mix of styles of any industry here, so mixed resin and mixed colour piles are normal. Check the strays first. Then separate the rackables, which are usually PP, from the nestables, which are usually HDPE. Describe each stack as its own line. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.

On the freight lanes: I-10

Houston sits on I-10, which runs from I-10 is the southernmost transcontinental Interstate, 2,460 miles long, the fourth-longest in the country. The metros we track on it hold 255,943 private warehousing jobs, 13.5% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Los Angeles (27,225), Inland Empire (118,368), San Antonio (16,751), Jacksonville (15,384), Phoenix (42,340) and New Orleans (2,090).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Columbus (34,200), Detroit (30,083) and Philadelphia (38,250).

Elsewhere in Texas

Dallas (82,593 jobs, 2.44 times Houston, busiest ZIP 75050), Laredo (2,014 jobs, 0.06 times Houston, busiest ZIP 78045), San Antonio (16,751 jobs, 0.50 times Houston, busiest ZIP 78218) and Austin (5,657 jobs, 0.17 times Houston, busiest ZIP 78744) are the other metros we cover in Texas, which has 175,579 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A market this size is made of many separate sites, so a pile in Houston is rarely the only one nearby. Large distribution clusters bring pooled pallets and mixed footprints into the same trailer, which is why the marks and the sizes get listed before anything else.

What a Houston load looks like

Expect chemical manufacturing first: 42,669 jobs in 2025. Photograph any staining and the drum seats and, for warehousing and storage, the yard stacks, from the dock side. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Any Houston pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.